Imperial Votes to Disaffiliate

Jun 25 2008 13:00

Ashley Brown

Imperial is to leave the National Union of Students, with 70.3% of 2,075 voters voting 'No' to continued affiliation.

Live!'s NUS conference t-shirts proved prophetic...

Imperial students have voted overwhelmingly to leave the National Union of Students, following a week-long period of voting in an affiliation referendum. A total of 2,075 votes were cast, just making the quorum of 2,022 votes required to make the result valid.

A turnout of 15.4% is half that of the last referendum, but an excellent turnout given the time of year. Imperial College Union will now immediately submit its paperwork for disaffiliation in order to meet a 1st July deadline, which is believed to be the cut-off date for saving next year's affiliation fee. There has been some disagreement with the NUS over the procedure for disaffiliation and the date at which next year's fee becomes due. Imperial would retain voting rights until December 31st, with the possibility of an extraordinary conference still to come.

2075 votes were cast, with 1 spoilt paper and the following votes:

Yes: 617 (29.7%)

No: 1457 (70.3%)

ICU President, Stephen Brown, said:

"It is unfortunate that the NUS failed to modernise this year but it is not reasonable for the NUS to expect Unions to continue to generously fund an organisation that has consistently failed to fulfill its potential. During this debate students felt that the quality of representation offered to them by NUS was woefully lacking and that on balance it was best that officer time and financial resources were re-directed to other priorities. I would like to thank both campaign teams and the student media for bringing the debate on NUS affiliation to the student body and I would like to thank the Returning Officer Alistair Cott for the fair and efficient manner in which he ran the referendum."

A number of NUS members and former ICU President John Collins had believed only a few hundred people would vote this late in the year.

"So what next for ICU? Do we just carry on as normal? I suppose it's not like there was anything extrordinary happening when we were in the NUS.. I can't believe we actually" AFFILIATED! (at the first place)

Yeah I know, its so exciting to be free from the evil shackles of the loonies! I'm really looking forward to the higher education stuff knowing that Imperial's got it's own voice and and won't be ignored because we're part of that dismal organisation. Rah rah!

If, in any referendum, it is clear that supporters of the status quo are boycotting in an attempt to lose the battle but win the war on a technicality then there is a case for removing the 15% quorum clause in the constitution.

Credit to the yes campaign on this one. They did not take the anti-democratic boycott route and instead argued for what they believed was best.

Congratulations. Although I've no idea what possessed you lot to affiliate in the first place. I only had to meet the NUS once to realise why my predecessors considered the organisation utterly pointless.

""What if" means that if 54 less people didn't vote, it wouldn't have reached quorum, so we would presumably have remained in the NUS for the time being... interesting point!"

Not sure that it is. The margin of victory for the no campaign was huge this time, 40 points. The affiliation was ridiculously close. So the fact that small numbers of people swing votes in which...erm...a small number of people vote is not, to my mind, especially interesting.

I was just surprised that people who wanted to stay in the NUS decided to vote, if I was of that mind set I'd never have voted and if a small number of people who voted Yes didn't vote, it wouldn't swing the results but make them invalid since they wouldn't have reached quorum.

Have finally recovered. I'm sorry for the way things have turned out, I really believe that it is in the best interest of Imperial students to remain within NUS. During the campaign I found out what NUS does exactly, and how it does it, and I'm not sure student unions, even with the best of intentions, could perform any better.

It will make a nice experiment though - how does an active, well-funded and well-connected union like Imperial fare with regards to HE's funding review next year, in comparison with NUS...

@24 "...how does an active, well-funded and well-connected union like Imperial fare with regards to HE's funding review next year, in comparison with NUS..."

This illustrates nicely why NUS does not represent Imperial with any understanding.

It's _not_ a funding review of HE; it's a review of the fees system for UG EU/UK HE students alone. These are half of Imperial's student population compared to three-quarters of the national HE student population.

For an overview of a review that affects HE _much_ more than the fees review - look at this presentation from HEFCE's Chair in April - www.hefce.ac.uk/news/events/2008/annconf/de/DE_presentation.ppt

What would be interesting to see (not that we can ever know); of those voting in both this and the previous referenda - how many changed their position?

How is it undemocratic? In this case less than half those needed to make the referendum quorate voted. That means that either the issue was not important enough to the Italian people for it to go to referendum or that the abstainers (those who wish to maintain the status quo) were in the majority anyway. Either way I think it gives a pretty accurate picture of what the Italian people wanted in the referendum.

@ old lag: As 'Hmm' put it, the "you lot" was a reference to the Union politic, not the student body.

I'm 99% certain that if you go through the records right back to 1922 you will find that every General Meeting and Referenda that has considered an NUS affiliation motion has voted in accordance with the wishes of the ICU President of the day.

@Soumaya: Imperial College Union did fine without the NUS in previous HE reviews. Back in 2004 I led a delegation of Imperial students to a mass lobby of parliament that senior NUS Officers acknowledged was larger than the number the NUS brought from all of their affiliates in the entire country. The ?3000 cap on fees was announced following the public and media outcry after ICU leaked Imperial's plans to charge up to ?15,000 per year - up this point the universities had been confident of persuading the government to allow them to charge ?5,000 or ?6,000. In accordance with our policy, ICU lobbying helped bury the proposal for a graduate tax (which IIRC the NUS preferred to tuition fees) at the last minute just as it was about to get into the 2003 HE White Paper. The London rate of student loan was also increased to about the level we had been calling for. We couldn't stop variable fees, but to be honest they were inevitable after the NUS supported the introduction of tuition fees in 1998: the government could only pretend all degrees are worth the same for so long.

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